The National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP) offers a collaborative network for Australian organisations to build and implement effective road safety strategies in the workplace.

The program offers organisations the resources to improve road safety that best fit their individual operations and, at the same time, improve business productivity through less time and money lost through safety incidents.

The program is not a prescriptive approach but aims to complement existing safety legislation by providing access to a ‘knowledge bank’ from a diverse network of organisations to given them the resources to implement their own initiatives. The tools will help make the business case for organisations shifting their safety focus from 'having' to safety to secure a contract to 'wanting' to because it is simply good business.

Who are the Gippsland Safe Freight Network?

We operate within the heavy truck industry in Gippsland, we represent forty companies who combined have several hundred trucks and over a thousand drivers.

After a series of major crashes and an increase in casualty crashes in Gippsland across several heavy vehicle transport types. The industry was invited to come around a table to discuss possible solutions and safer ways of do their business. This was formalised by follow-up round table meetings with a broad cross-section of stakeholders involved.

Our work and that of the NRSPP partnership fit together well, we see you as providing the broader higher level networking whereas we are connected to the ground level and “coal face” with a very good and effective access to large numbers of drivers across most freight task types.

What does road safety mean to the Gippsland Safe Freight Network?

Since 2010 this model has proven extremely effective in providing accurate information about safer systems of operations as well as changing the culture of workplaces so as to ensure that safety becomes imbedded in the businesses. Gippsland Safer Freight was formed to develop local solutions to crashes using the four pillars of road safety (under toward zero). We currently have a membership which includes all local stakeholders involved in the various freight tasks including Vic Police and Vic Roads TSS. This represents access to about 2,000 local drivers.

We have run successful local campaigns which include “lighting up trucks for safety” as well as roll over training – our members invest heavily in R&D to improve vehicle safety and have won national awards for In-vehicle camera systems and new trailer designs as well as load restraint systems.

We have recently been funded to develop our network model across Australia through the NHVR and have commenced this process in key accident hot spots. The first of these will be in Mount Isa dealing with the high crash rates on the highway between Mount Isa and Cloncurry.